Boys’ underachievement in writing is a well-documented issue in primary schools. This CLPE project gave experienced teachers an opportunity to develop and document teaching approaches to raise writing standards and share their practice with other teachers.

Using the Standards Fund, 20 teachers from seven LEAs (including head teachers, deputies and consultants) participated in the project, working in a range of settings from Nursery to KS3, The publication features small-scale case-studies from teachers and includes contributions from researchers in this field.

The focus is on effective teaching as much as an underachieving boys. Boys and Writing identifies a number of strategies that contribute to boys improving their writing – strategies based on improving motivation and purpose, and the use of oral and visual support for writing. 

Project teachers identified boys who were uninterested in writing and unwilling to review or revise their work. Teachers noticed that boys are often confidence and articulate in discussion but lack similar confidence ion writing, and that many boys need considerable reassurance that they are doing the right thing. Successful approaches to help boys feel more positive about the writing process included explicit discussion and targets identifying key features to improve a piece of writing, working with a writing partner, and examining how words and images structure non-fiction writing.

Project teachers identify and describe the benefits of providing ways into writing with which boys feel familiar and confident; these include popular culture such as music, television programmes and cinema, ICT, video and visual stimuli. Drama and story-telling also proved inspirational for project boys in their writing.

The role of talk in writing, or “oral rehearsal for writing”, is a strong theme in Boys and Writing – talk as a means to inhabit and explore characters or dilemmas, or talk to explicitly identify the way forward in planning or revising a piece of writing.

A fundamental point that came up throughout the project was that good practice in the teaching of writing benefits all pupils.

Boys and Writing publication